The National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) is seeking grant applications from academia and industry in order to catalyze next-generation advances in genomics through technology development.
The goal is to provide a mechanism for support of very novel and high impact work from across this gamut of genomics technology development, support technologies that will have a major impact in the next five to seven years.
Technology advances, particularly new sequencing systems, have enabled many research projects that are producing stunning insights into biology and disease. Extending beyond sequence per se, assays have been developed to determine nucleotide modifications, chromatin state, nuclear organization, and dynamics of those features.
Nevertheless, the cost to assay completely important features of genomes of individual cells or people remains high and the assays are complex, and we remain far from achieving the low costs and high quality needed to use comprehensive genomic information in many research applications or in individual health care.
Any proposed technology development work should allow comprehensive genomic analysis of features not assayable today, or an increase of at least an order of magnitude improvement in an existing technology in terms of data quality, throughput, efficiency or comprehensiveness.
Examples of possible research topics are:
- DNA, RNA, epigenome, transcriptome, chromatin, etc. from the same sample
- High throughput genome modifications (e.g., by recombination and transient assays using reporter or in situ assays), for replacement, activation and inhibition, with genomic readout
- Cost-effective scaling genomic assays
- In situ methods (tissue context) for DNA, epigenome, other functional assays, and RNA analyses
- Measuring proximal transcription dynamics, and transcriptome dynamics over time
Further details are available in the collection of solicitations related to the Genomic Technology development effort:
- PAR-16-014 R01 Research Project Grant
- PAR-16-015 R21 Exploratory/Developmental Grant
- PAR-16-016 R43/R44 Small Business Research Grant
- PAR-16-017 R44 Small Business Research Grant, Direct to Phase II
These funding opportunities explicitly exclude the development of technologies for DNA sequencing and for direct RNA sequencing; those projects should respond to parallel solicitations RFA-HG-15-031, RFA-HG-15-032, and RFA-HG-15-033.
